Council Speech delivered by Cape Town Mayor, Geordin Hill-Lewis

27 January 2022

An Adjustment Budget to deliver care, dignity, safety and pride

Molweni, good morning, goeie more, as-salaam alaikum, shalom,

Introduction

To our Madam Speaker, to our fellow councillors, colleagues, friends, and to our fellow Capetonians – Happy New Year and welcome back. It is wonderful to see everyone returned safely, and I hope you had a precious time with your loved ones.
On Boxing Day we bid farewell to our beloved Arch, a truly great Capetonian, perhaps the  very greatest. I would ask us to observe a quiet moment now in honour of the Arch, and in thought for Mama Leah Tutu and the Tutu family. Thank you.

In all that happened during this December period, we can all feel proud of how Cape Town’s flag flew high.

We delivered a beautiful and fitting send off for the Arch with the most wonderful interfaith tribute seen around the world, and the symbolic display of lighting up our City Hall and Table Mountain in his honour.

We dealt with a major power outage after an Eskom cable failure left thousands of Capetonians without electricity for almost 24 hours. We kept our residents informed throughout the day and I visited our staff on the ground who worked through the night and next day to fix the fault and re-connect the power.

We were filled with sadness watching Parliament burn, but also felt immense pride learning of our fire-fighters quick response and watching them fight the blaze, saving the remaining and most historic buildings from burning down.

President Ramaphosa thanked our fire fighters and went as far as to say, and I quote: “It does show that there are certain things that do work, even as we may think that the wheels are coming off, on everything…that we do have one city that works… when the chips are down.” Thank you for acknowledging Cape Town’s dedicated fire staff, Mr President.

We immediately offered our City Hall to the Speaker of Parliament so that the State of the Nation could continue uninterrupted and I am pleased that this offer was accepted in the true spirit of national unity in a time of tragedy. Cape Town will be proud to host the SONA next month, and we will do all we can to make it a success.

Higher Purpose

In our first meeting of this new year, let us reaffirm our clear sense of higher purpose.
So many South Africans feel like the society described in our national Constitution is a pipe dream, something we were once on track to seeing, but will never see again.

In Cape Town we plant a flag for a different future. Our city can restore hope in South Africa again by standing as a shining example of what it really means to give people dignity, to unpick – stitch by painful stitch – the legacy of apartheid, and to “free the potential of each person” by rolling back poverty.

In the Cape Town of our future, there are better life chances, there is more safety, there is more work, and residents feel connected to one another, and proud to live in a city they love.

The Adjustment Budget

Today we table the Adjustment Budget.

I have often said in Parliament, if you want to know what a government cares about, don’t listen to their words, just look at their budget.

This document is more than just numbers on pages.

This Adjustment Budget represents the first steps on our journey of hope towards the Cape Town we envision.

In this mini-budget we show what is important to us as a new government, and we show indications of where our investments will be in the main budget and in the years ahead.

We know that every rand we discuss today is a rand that is taxed from the pockets of hard working Capetonians. This places on us a profound duty to respect the public’s money and to be good stewards of it to the betterment of our whole city.

I am very grateful to the budget team and the CFO for their work in getting this budget prepared. Our budget meetings continued on Christmas eve, and the team worked throughout the holiday to get this ready.
Care and dignity

This is a budget that demonstrates care and gives people dignity.

We do this by allocating:

- R600 million to free basic services

- R100 million to cleansing in informal areas

- R24 million for new vehicles for a sewer spill intervention plan

- R10 million for new Safe Spaces for the homeless

- R2 million for title deeds

We confirm the announcement I made in the inaugural address of a R600 million increase in allocation to free basic services to the poorest residents.

Cape Town will now spend R3.7 billion on free basic services for poor residents, more than any other city in South Africa.
We do this because we know that families are experiencing hardship and need help.

On my very first day in office, I went to Khayelitsha to do a service delivery inspection of sewer spills and blockages.
This is a problem in many parts of the city, with around 300 spills a day being reported.

I visited the home of a granny in Solomon Tshuku road in Khayelitsha whose house was flooded with sewer water.
If we are serious about dignity, this cannot happen. 

The only real solution lies in major infrastructure investments, which must be done, but that takes time and we need to see an improvement now. I asked for a short term sewer spill intervention plan in November.

Today I can confirm that this plan is now in place.

To improve response times we have budgeted R24m to buy 4 new jet trucks, 1 new jet-vac truck, 1 new vacuum tanker, and 6 new grabber trucks.

We have also set the ambitious target of more than trebling our proactive pipe replacement programme, with the aim to get to 100 kilometres of sewer pipe replacement per year.

Dignity also means breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty by giving people real asset ownership.

We budget R2 million to speed up our title deed handover programme, because no Capetonian should be a permanent tenant of the state.

Importantly, today we are also directing R10 million for new and expanded Safe Spaces for the homeless in our city.
We are committed to demonstrating care for the homeless and providing greater Safe Space capacity.

The Safe Space’ facilities opened in the CBD and Bellville currently have a total capacity for 700 persons under normal conditions, offering 3 meals per day, blankets, mattresses and cleaning packs on entry, substance abuse interventions, skills training, ID book assistance, and access to EPWP work placement.

Now we budget to grow the capacity of these Safe Spaces and to work towards opening new ones, as no person should live on unsafe streets. Accepting the daily offers of shelter and social assistance is the best choice for dignity, safety, and well-being.

This is a budget that demonstrates care and gives people dignity.

Growth and jobs

This is also a budget that shows our commitment to growth and jobs.

Today we are directing more funding to our Events Department who are building an online events portal and online calendar for easier application by event organisers from here and around the world.

And on the topic of our global reach, I want to applaud our tourism and hospitality sectors, and every city official and stakeholder partner involved for what we achieved in December. While the rest of the world was unjustly placing travel bans on South Africa, Cape Town didn’t waste any time to pivot quickly to a domestic tourism campaign. The result is that R800 million flowed into this sector in December, with more than 20 000 passengers a day passing through the gates of Cape Town International Airport. That is something we can all be proud of!

In line with our commitment to make this the easiest city to do business in Africa, is an allocation of R13m towards the Cape Skills and Employment Accelerator project, and R6 million to our investment attraction agency, Wesgro.

To date the Cape Skills initiative has trained just short of 1400 previously unemployed youth with all 1400 beneficiaries being offered permanent jobs upon completing their training.

In keeping with our focus on job creation, I am pleased to announce that we are able to increase our allocation to EPWP work thanks to a grant from the President’s Employment Programme of R161 million.

This is a budget that shows our commitment to growth and jobs.

But we will struggle to grow our Cape Town economy so long as Eskom cannot supply sufficient electricity, and when Cape Town families keep having to pay massive Eskom electricity increases.

We rallied more than 30 000 Capetonians in just 48 hours to sign a petition rejecting Eskom’s request for a 20,5% price hike to NERSA and I presented those signatures when I spoke as the Mayor of the first metro in South Africa to speak out against this increase at NERSA’s public hearings last week.
Speaker,

Growth also requires infrastructure investment.

In our very first Council meeting I raised my deep concerns about capital under-expenditure, and have done so again since then. I have made it clear that significant additional infrastructure investment is absolutely critical to the growth of this city. The capital spend write down we are doing today is not repeatable.

While a significant portion of the under-spend was actually due to the way National Treasury budgets for the MyCiti rollout grants and was beyond our control, there are other delays which are in our control. There can be no excuses in 2022. I want to see this money being spent where it is most needed and to see these budgets growing every year, not shrinking.

The good news on this front is that today we are increasing the repairs and maintenance budget by R100 million to boost our programmes to maintain the City’s affordable rental stock, public transport interchanges, and city facilities and infrastructure.

A city of pride

This is a budget that shows our commitment to building a city of pride.

We must take pride in our city and in our jobs, be committed to excellence and this must show in the quality of our work and our spaces.

That is why we have allocated R3m for the repair and refurbishment of the Muizenberg beach huts and lifeguard huts. These huts have long been an iconic image in Cape Town’s colourful landscape, and they are literally a postcard for Cape Town tourism. But they have fallen into terrible disrepair, and do not demonstrate the pride we are trying to build.

Their refurbishment has thus far been led by a wonderful group of residents who have run a fundraising campaign to save the huts and preserve this iconic Cape Town image. We are so grateful for this kind of citizen-led pride in Cape Town and we are happy to be able to contribute to their refurbishment now.

Speaking of iconic Cape Town spots – during the campaign I visited the Strandfontein Pavilion. I met a man there who told me he had met his wife at the Mermaid in the early 1980s, when the car park was full of Cortinas and the Pavilion attracted thousands of Capetonians from across Mitchells Plain and beyond.

But I was shocked by its condition now. It is now officially a condemned building. This too does not demonstrate pride in Cape Town. We should not allow our public facilities to ever deteriorate to this point. Every resident deserves to be able to visit quality, beautiful public facilities that show Cape Town’s commitment to excellence and inclusivity.

So a relatively modest allocation in this budget is also one I am most excited about. We are going to rebuild the Pavilion.
When it is done, every Plainsman and Plainswoman will be able to enjoy a Pavilion that they can feel proud of, and there may even still be a few Cortinas around.

This year we allocate R2 million for the planning phase of the rebuilding of the Strandfontein Pavilion, followed by allocations for construction in the coming years.

We’re also starting off 2022 with a major city-wide Clean-Up Campaign, and I invite every Capetonian to join me on this campaign and do their part too to Keep Cape Town Clean Together.

This is a budget that shows our commitment to building a city of pride.

Conclusion

Speaker,

The budget I have discussed here today shows what we care about and what we are working towards in Cape Town – a city that is more caring, that gives more dignity, a city committed to growing the economy and getting more people into work. And a city that builds pride in our city and our country. This is our higher purpose, and it is reflected in our first Adjustment Budget today.

We cannot do it alone, and it wouldn’t work alone anyway. We need every resident to help build the city we envision over the coming years.

If we do, we will shake off the feeling that South Africa can know only decline and failure – the examples of which we see everywhere - and we can show that the future can and will be different.

It can be different because we believe it, and it will be different because we will work to prove it here in Cape Town.
It is my pleasure to table this Adjustment Budget.

Thank you

End

Published by:
City of Cape Town, Media Office